Venice: City of Women

This week an introduction to Venetian women, as part of the ongoing series of Venetian episodes.

When I originally designed the Venetian episodes, I was going to write a cumulative story like “Thirty Objects of Desire” or the Rosaline stories. As such there was a twist at the end and I’d been keeping the twist to myself. Since this is now going to become a supplement, somewhat like the Cornish supplement, there’s no point in keeping the twist to myself.

It’s this: the city of Venice has – behind each corner and under the water of the lagoon – a parallel, mirror city – called Serenissima. Serenissima is ruled by a Doge, but the Doge is ruled by a faerie, mentioned only once in Ars Magica literature. It’s called the Master of Games, in Latin the Magister Ludi.

I put together the Magister Ludi because I wanted something at the upper end of the Might frame that is given for the design of characters. The frame tops out at 75 Might. For magical creatures that’s the Great Drake of the Pyrenees. Saint Mary is as powerful as saints may become, and the Dukes of Hell that are able to walk the earth reach 75 Might. For faeries, originally, it was Hermes, but Hermes Who Steals Away can be simulated with a far less powerful creature.

I didn’t get the chance to completely unfold his backstory. He claims to be what’s left of the Founder Tytalus. He went into the fae lands and was distorted by them. Now he is using the city as an engine to build a new embodiment for a queen of the fae: a powerful piece that allows whatever is in deep Arcadia to make itself known and felt in the mortal world.

Faeries are dependent on humans because they are dependent on our stories, but with a powerful piece like the Queen can force an early Renaissance. As she is dawning, anachronistic things appear in Serenissima. Faeries are forcing humans to tell original stories – the Master is changing the way we tell stories about ourselves, in turn changing the stories told about his servants, making them more powerful.

My way of collecting together material for this is, by recording a LibriVox biography of the history of the Dogeressas of Venice. I’ve already mentioned one of them in the story of the Rotting Princess. I was being a little bit careful and secretive there because I’m used to holding the twist until the last episode.

The husband of the Rotting Princess offered to whatever powers could save his wife whatever they wanted. In the same way that in Second Edition Ars Magica there was concern that a faerie queen of Winter was going to make a treaty with the Normans so that she could rampage across England and Aquitaine whenever she wanted, and help the English take Normandy, so by making this treaty the Doge has allowed the Master of Games to inhabit his city. That is, his Aura is coterminous with the city’s borders. This is why Venice is a city of strange sights. and weird delights. and passions. It’s because all of that is being distilled into the Princess of Glass who is gradually becoming more and more real in the heart of the city.

So to veer away from that I’m going to now give you a little bit of information about Venetian women that appears in the preface of the biographies of the Dogearessas. The writer over-admires the women of Venice: he seems cringy and excessive and slightly smarmy. I do apologize for that tone. As we go through we’re going to look at how we can turn the items that the women regularly use into story hooks.

The women of Venice were always distinguished for their natural quickness and intelligence – this sprightliness and vivacity of manner, their talkativeness and coaxing ways, in their fondness of music song and dance. Perhaps the most characteristic talent however was their devotion to the toilet, to their love of beauty and have clothes.

The book this a sourced from is from the 19th century rather than saying toilet we now for some reason used the french toilette.

In person that were usually somewhat short of stature, but endowed with grace of carriage. Their figures, especially their bosoms, were full even to the degree of stoutness. This was in a great measure due to the softness of the nation’s climate, which induced a natural and becoming indolence. Nevertheless they were vigorous in action and quite able to give a good account of themselves in marital and other squabbles.

Their features were clearly cut and yet not too severe their heads were well shaped and their eyes blue like their skies, or grey like their seas. Their hands and feet was small. Their most attractive attributes were the fair, peach-like delicacy of their skin and the brilliant luster and golden sheen of their abundant light auburn hair.

The slightly voyeuristic tone of that aside it allows us to describe characters from Venice who are of the old families. They generally speaking are of such and such a height have eyes of such-and-such a colour.

The treatment of the skin was a speciality of the Venetian women. The use of the baths was one of their inheritances. They bathed the whole body frequently, sometimes in the sea at the Lido, but every house has its bath – in humble homes of wood or common metal, in patrician palaces of porcelain glass or silver, with the water infused with simple or exotic perfumes. One of their secrets was to remain with the whole body immersed and motionless for at least half an hour and another was they never rubbed the skin but just dabbed at it and let it dry naturally.

Then the nostrums of the masseuses art were exploited. A not uncommon custom was to lay a slice of raw veal dipped in new milk upon the face at night.

When I was a boy my family owned a butchery and the same trick placing steak upon the face was used for black eyes caused in pub fights, but moving along…This is how people who live in the middle of a marsh don’t suffer negative ageing modifiers. They bathe a lot and they have a sort of folk alchemy that they use to treat their illnesses.

For richer women other artifices prevailed: puffs and powders to gently temper the epidermis or hide unsightly blotches and pigments. Rouge and others which art might most effectively color crude or innovated nature. Every woman and girl in Venice at all times painted, even the poorest of them. The cult is still practiced: you never see a woman without artificial color there. By the way I still see the true Venetian type of female beauty, sitting leisuredly under shade or shelter while some sympathetic voice reads Aristo or some other favorite poet

One very delightful attribute of Venetian women was their fragrance. They were always perfumed. Whenever a gentle Dona passed she left behind her a delicious aroma. If she paused the air around her became saturated with the sweetest odours. This seductive charm is still characteristic of the real Venetian. Her lover scent is hereditary and delightful.

We’ll come back to this in a later episode but selling perfume is one way that magi can make money for their covenant without trading. Another hooks is that going to a perfume shop and sitting around, sampling different perfumes, and having a chat with your friends is a very common way for patrician women to spend their time/ This allows magicians who run such places to develop a web of contacts and to hear intriguing stories/ This habit comes from the dogaressa who became the rotting princess that is she introduced the style of socialising

In a very real sort of way the Venetian gentledonna was a living embodiment of Venus, the fairest and sweetest of all the goddesses, hence Venice has been quite aptly called the City of Venus the city of fair women.

As a reminder Venus is a liminal creature. People think that she should be a faerie because she’s a goddess, but she was born from the foam that rose up when Zeus cut off his father’s genitals and threw them into the sea. She’s technically a Titaness, and a member of the Magical Realm

In the 16th century the far-famed Portuguese bucchero got to Venice – little charms of sweet-smelling clay – and they very soon became every woman’s treasures. The odour dispensed when a bucchero was dipped in hot water was very refreshing and resembled the aroma which arises from parched ground on a hot summer’s day after a copious shower of rain.

Modern internet people call this scent “petrichor”. I like the idea of these little balls of clay as magical items for illusionists, so I’m tempted to sneak them in, along with many of the other wonderful Venetian things that we can’t have in 1220. That’s one of the reasons why the presence of the Master of Games pushes excess a little further, a little faster, so that the material culture of Venice evolves towards what we expect a couple of hundred years later in Mythic Europe.

When dipped in essences they gave forth forever so long the sweetest of perfumes. Women wore them in their bosoms and were accustomed to place them often upon their lips, so that their kisses might be scented too.

And now we may see where the one Kiss Ranged spell we have, Kiss of Death, comes from. The other kiss ranged effect I can think of is Kiss of the Mermaid from the Fairies book. It is also perfectly fine for people living in a city where the streets are made out of water.

Not only were the girls and women of Venice, the city of saints, much drawn to the general claims and duties of religion, but in particular they were exponents of some of its mayor behests. The Apostle speaks of the hair of women: it was given to them to be a protection and a glory. The Venetians exactly carried out the apostolic injunction. From the very first foundation of the river Alto away in the fifth century the women of the lagoons were accustomed to resort daily to the altane, or flat roofs of their dwellings, and they spend much time in combing and dressing their hair in the sunshine.

So an altane – that is a rooftop – could be a ritually prepared boundary space. Since women are meant to be spending a lot of time up there anyway and no one pays much attention, why not do what the urban Magi do and create a ritual space with enormous props that boost your power?

This habit they undoubtedly inherited from their Greek ancestresses. Homer sings about the beautiful fair hair of the Greeks and he has painted the captivating Helen of Troy with abundant locks of gold. The general color of Grecian women’s hair was brown, light and dark, and such naturally was the hue of Venetian women’s tresses. The poets, however, made a dead set against that tint and stated their case so broadly that brown hair was regarded, with aversion, as a pertaining to traitors, murderers, and other evildoers.

Fairies, being creatures of story, will hold to this cultural value: murderous fairies will have brown hair in Venice, much in the same way that werewolf fairies have red hair in Slavic areas.

The painters took up their cue. We rarely see in the pictures of Titian, Tintoretto or Veronese women with brown hair. Auburn, or as they called it “golden”, hair was the most popular, most beautiful, and most expressive. The more it glittered the better was it liked and what nature made art embellished.

A primitive but withal most effective device…was the superimposition upon the top of the head (the hair being welcomed out and rippling over the shoulders) of a crownless wide-brimmed straw hat called a solana (sun frame).

As a reminder the shape and material table suggests a +4 bonus for enchantments that affect the image of the wearer of a hat.

The brim shielded the neck and bosom whilst the sunlight, not the heat, got at the roots of the hair and blanched its growth. Every altane had its group of animated mushrooms – each woman and girl sitting thus, and ever and anon damping the exposed cuticle with a small sponge stuck at the end of a spinning spindle or some such sceptre, and dipped in tinctures.

There’s a lot of space for folk magic and domestic magic here or even high alchemy.

Beneath the brim of the solana big long tooth combs of yellow tortoiseshell we use to keep the hair supple, or frizzing irons, or bones to make it curl or wave. This method was admirably effective and is still adopted privately by many a beautiful Venetian girl and buxom dame.

The shape and material bonus table gives the following: combs hair +7 beauty +5. Tortoiseshell does not appear on the table. I did write something about it a while ago. The ancient Romans believed that tortoiseshell was a paradox because it was a fundamentally unclean substance that had been made beautiful enough that you could put it into inserts in tables.

With respect to the recipes employed in the concussion of the tinctures little can be authoritatively said, for each fair one kept her elixir and its secret to herself. Anyhow generally speaking one may say that the finest Lido golden sand, crushed vitreous blocks of Murano, ivory sawdust, powdered seashells, and in exuberant and extravagant humor, even powdered pearls and precious gold dust, were employed.

The powdered Murano mentioned before this is glass. Murano is the island where the best glass is made at one point in Venice’s history.

Vegetable compounds, the juice of grapes, berberis, ivy berries, lemon squash and orange flavor with aromatic powders of all sorts and kinds were also used. Dyes, strictly so-called, were not in favor: their effect was the ephemeral.

Magic can generate many of these substances or, alternatively, they can be leftovers from lab experiments. Where else are you going to get ivory sawdust? Lemon juice is still used in my part of Australia for this blonding ritual, or so I’m led to believe.

Venetian women and girls owed a great deal to Dogaressa Teodora Selvo, in the 11th century, for she introduced toilet batteries fully furnished with all the requisites for skin, hair, and teeth, together with delicious eastern perfumes.

That’s her. That’s literally the Rotting Princess.

Venetians were past mistresses in the mysteries of hairdressing. The Greek style was always that must in favor, where the hair, not being too dry nor too tightly plaited, was drawn off the face and neck, tied in a ribbon at the back and then coiled round and round the head and stuck fast with combs and pins. The hard line of the forehead was tempered by a small row of curls under a semi-diadem fillet or crescent, called a gabbia – literally a cage – and usually made of precious metal and jeweled.

I had thought that diadems were in the Shape and Material bonus table, but I can’t see them. I can see crowns (wisdom. wisdom 3, to control people 3 gain respect or exercise authority 5) does this count as a crown or would we prefer something else I’m sure diadem’s had been started up because Calebais had diadems rather than true crowns.

Another fashion affected by gay and opulent courtesans was called al Corno with reference to the conventional headdress of the dogaressas. Sometimes only one horn was projected, at other two or even three or more, an invisible bandeau was hidden under the hair bearing spikes of tortoiseshell or whale bone, at which single strands of hair were twisted and curled until they assumed the appearance of vine spirals and tendrils…It was a very difficult feat to arrange these horns becomingly so as to avoid any idea of the ridiculous, the animal, or the demoniacal. Crescenti they were euphemistically called, as suggestive of the crescent moon of Diana the Huntress of the Gods.

Sometimes historical material just hands you a headdress like now why is the dagger of Venice who has her own patron saint wandering around with the headdress of the cult of Diana the obvious thing to do would be to place her at the center of something like a court of the Golden Bough which is covered in one of the early wrasse magical books it’s the thing that Frazer got very excited about about a sacrificial King the implementation alludes me for the moment but it’s important to mark that that’s there

The painters never admired this style of hairdressing and very few, if any of them, have depicted the al Corno. Giacomo Franco and other engravers however had preserved for us illustrations of this peculiar mode. A third manner of hairdressing was popular amongst quite young girls and aged women, the two extremes, the cap of Juliet. The hair was combed out and smoothed down and then tight-fitting jaunty caps or nets were fitted close over the head behind the ears leaving the long locks of hair spread out like fans upon on the neck behind or in small ringlets. These caps usually very beautifully made, as often as not gold or silver thread, or net, or wire, and gemmed.

The shape and material bonuses don’t help us much here. Juliet caps are presumably just another type of hat, so they have the same bonuses as the solana I mentioned before. Hair nets are technically nets which means that they have immobilise, and then whatever material they’re made out of. I’d like to suggest however that they instead have the same bonus as helmets (at least one of the bonuses) and that they affect the mind of the wearer with a bonus of 4. Beyond that, of course, they are jewelry and jewelry is protection of various scores (so maybe protection 3).

A favorite style was a delicate net of silk, or very small artificial flowers of blue, as contrasting most serenely with the golden glitter of the hair.

Perhaps I have an older version of the shape and material collection because I’d swear that silk had been written up somewhere. House Tremere magi wear a special sort of silk as their uniform. It’s made by ethereal fishermen spiders, which are grown in the depths of their covenants.

The fashionable always carried fans, not those with which we are familiar but little flags set on stems or poles. Ventolini “wind guards” they were called. Strong sea breezes, not strong sunbeams, were to be warded off for they disturbed the hair and roughened the skin. Venetian beauties never, as we say, fanned themselves, they had no need to do so because the sea breeze tempered the sun’s heat.

So I love these. Back in “Sanctuary of Ice” I suggested that female magicians should carry a spindle, rather than a wand. It performs much the same function, and when someone sees you carrying one they think “Well it’s a woman. She’s carrying a spindle. Women carry spindles everywhere/” Now these little flags aren’t like the fans from the English Empire lobbing into China. These wind guards are similar things that women carry everywhere and could use instead of a wand. Listen to the description and you’ll see that there are all sorts of ways you can customise yours to suit your magician: different woods, different fabrics, different rattling little beads, different symbols on the front. They’re perfect, and they’re lovely, and I’m so glad we found them.

These fans were from six to twelve inches square and were made of cloth of gold, richly embroidered silk, Burano lace, or feathers. They were fringed with beads and shells, through which the wind whistled musically when shaken by the air. The stem a foot or more long was usually of tortoisell, carved cedar wood, or of gold and silver and jeweled for state occasions.

Venetians never used parasols or sun shades. They wore their dress sleeves short in order to expose the arm with its jeweled bracelets above the elbow (obvious magic items) and their bare or lace-covered breasts to the soft sea air of the lagoons and the not too ardent rays of the golden sun.

So there we have an introduction to Venetian women and particularly the magic items that your maga could wear surreptitiously as she strides about Venice.